Celia Paul is recognised as one of the most important painters working in Britain today. She was born in India in 1959, before moving to England as a young child. Her major solo exhibitions include Celia Paul, curated by Hilton Als, at Yale Center for British Art (2018) and The Huntington (2019); Desdemona for Celia by Hilton, Gallery Met, New York (2015-16); and Gwen John and Celia Paul, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2012-13). Her work was included in the group exhibition All Too Human at Tate Britain (2018), and is in many collections, including the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Saatchi Collection and Metropolitan Museum, New York.
Paul interweaves John's biography ... with accounts of her own life
and lyrical readings of John's paintings ... summoning a version of
the artist at her most imaginative and prolific.
*Times Literary Supplement*
At once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and
something between the two... This book lets the reader into a world
of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is
that unexpected kernel of confidence and self-belief that the
author shared with Gwen John.
*Spectator*
Powerfully honest... Her voice is deceptively plain and her
insights about her own art, as well as the choices she had to make
as a woman, are both illuminating and full of courage... a
beautiful book.
*Daily Mail*
It is really Paul who's centre stage, and she is fascinating; I do
not feel, at this point, that I could ever tire of her mind, and
the unlikely, singular way it turns.
*Observer*
An excellent new book. . . . In a nod to the epistolary novel, she
addresses her letters to 'Dear Gwen.' It's a risky conceit, but as
the intimacy grows - if not with John, then certainly with us -
their clarity on the grammars of gender is compelling, and utterly
contemporary. Truthfulness does not run one way, any more than
power and vulnerability do.
*New York Times Book Review*
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